Word: plater
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Andres Duany is Mr. Outside to Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk's Ms. Inside. He ^ inspires, he charms, he gives the stirring, witty lectures. She organizes, she teaches, she makes the heartfelt case for a particular scheme. Both are relentless and smart and talented, and both are American baby boomers (he left communist Cuba as a child in 1960; her parents left communist Poland in the late '40s), who met as Princeton undergraduates in the early...
...when Duany and Plater-Zyberk were hired by quixotic developer Robert Davis to turn 80 acres of Gulf Coast scrubland into a resort, that they ceased being merely interesting architects and started becoming visionary urban planners. As with all revolutions, the essential idea was simple: instead of building another dull cluster of instant beach-front high- rises, the developer and designers wondered, why not create a genuine town, with shops and lanes and all the unpretentious grace and serendipitous quirks that have always made American small towns so appealing? Thus was born the town of Seaside -- and with...
Their intent is not to reproduce any particular old-fashioned place. Rather, Duany and Plater-Zyberk have meticulously studied the more-than-skin-deep particulars of traditional towns and cities from Charleston to New Orleans to Georgetown, and of the great prewar suburbs, such as Mariemont, Ohio. They've looked at how streets were laid out, how landmarks were placed, the intermingling of stores and houses, the rough consistency of buildings' cornice lines and materials. They've measured the optimal distances between houses across the street and next door, figured out just what encourages walking (narrow streets, parked cars, meaningful...
Duany and Plater-Zyberk are not anti-development. Indeed, businesspeople seem to like them and their notions of enlightened self-interest. Joseph Alfandre, the man behind Kentlands and Belmont, had been a very successful developer of rather routine suburban pods around Washington. In 1988 he was considering land-use plans for the 352-acre Kentlands site. Then he heard about Duany and Plater-Zyberk, became a convert, canceled his plans and started over...
...what worries Duany and Plater-Zyberk most are their pseudo followers, developers and architects who apply a gloss of ye-olde-towne charm without supplying any of the deeper, more fundamental elements of old-fashioned urban coherence. Calthorpe agrees emphatically. "You can have nice streets, and you can put trees back on them, and you can make beautiful buildings with front porches again, but if the only place it leads is out to the expressway, then we are going to have the same environment all over again...